


Sweetly, tenderly

by uumuu



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disturbing Fluff, F/M, Female Maglor, Genderswap, I think that's the best definition of this, No Sex, Sibling Incest, Some referenced violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 01:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3191258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything ends, and everything begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweetly, tenderly

Dawn hadn't broken yet, but they were already walking. 

They couldn't afford to stop too often, or too long. The land was breaking, folding onto itself or sinking into the sea. All vegetation had withered. The air was laden with the acrid smells of destruction, wafting from decayed matter and scorched soil in a clinging vapour which clogged their lungs. The little water still to be found tasted like smoke. Therefore they pressed on, so long as they had strength to. 

When it faltered, when their legs refused to second their will and forced them to rest, they lay in each other's arms, the pouch with the Silmarils between them, wrapped in the fur of a bear which Tyelcormo had taken down with a spear and a good dose of agility, the last barriers they had to ward off the attrition of a world which was dead and which would have gladly seen them dead, too. 

They smelled blood on each-other. Blood drenched their clothes, and what was left of their armour. Orcish blood and Elven blood mixed together, like a return to their origin, stronger than grime and sweat. Blood from a half-frozen carcass they had found on their path (it could have been human or elven, it had been impossible to tell) and eaten from. 

“Death to repel death. It's merely an expedient,” Maitimo had said, carving the flesh with the hand whose preeminent skill had been meting out death.

The same hand, cold and bony, held Macalaurë's own when they trudged on, as the other had when Macalaurë had been a wee little girl and going out for walks with her big brother had been the most thrilling adventure.

'We will reach the mountains', he said, often, almost at regular intervals.

Macalaurë tightened her hands every time. Both the one she rested in her brother's larger one, and the one which clutched the pouch with the Silmarils. 

She had sung at first, but now she rarely did, except to lull her brother to sleep. She concentrated on the rhythm of shuffling feet and beating hearts.

They should already have reached the mountains, but they had come upon a deep rift in the earth, a fissure they had had no way to cross. It had been filled with liquid rock, like a pool of lustrous fire, and Maitimo had stared at it in fascination. Macalaurë had tugged on his hand and drawn him away from it.

“We have our own fire, still,” she had reminded him, tightening her hold on him. 

Maitimo had nodded sheepishly, and uttered an incantation – _nai alya alya alya nai tyeluva ñwalmë sina hútavan naiceldar_ – the same he uttered whenever they lay down, words of blessing, words of parting from the only god they had ever hearkened to.

“We are still grappling.” 

A gambol with despair. Macalaurë courted it with stray leftovers of the past. The lively patter of childish feet on the smooth paving stones of Tirion's streets. Her brother lifting her up to touch the water of the fountain that stood in a square not far from their house. Picking up strawberries from Maitimo's upturned hands, a simple offering that had made her feel like a king. Her brother's side had always been her special place. In Valinor, she had dreamt of being married to him. It had been a childish fantasy, daydreams to make a life already filled with splendour even more perfect.

Now they had only each other, the fountain had turned into a bubbling pool of blood – like the one where she had drowned the killers of her youngest sisters in Sirion – and the strawberries had been replaced by uneven chunks of raw flesh that tasted strangely sweet.

But all that too would go away. 

At last, they found a passage East, a strip of land that was still attached to the regions beyond, at the foot of what once had been the Andram.

Amon Ereb greeted their return, with its towering reminder of loss, but once they passed it, they were forced to veer north again. All the waters from the rivers of Ossiriand seemed to have poured out of their beds and had inundated the land.

“The sea will flood here too,” Macalaurë said. They had seen the sea swallow the morass that had been Doriath, already buried in a shroud of rotten trees. It too had looked like a simmering pool of blood to her (it had never been anything else).

The Sarn Athrad they found almost dry, and the stone-crossing of the old Dwarvish road had become a line of slimy rocks that had no more tears to weep above the wretched burial of those who had been treacherously killed there.

“I'll carry you across,” Maitimo said, peering at the river bed as if he expected orcs to jump out of it.

“I'm the one carrying us all across,” Macalaurë couldn't help quipping, allowing herself a small smile. Despair didn't like smiles, and she would make sure despair was the one biting the dust at the end of their cavort.

Life grew within her. 

Life to start anew.

Life they had crafted in the embrace of hopelessness.

Life nurtured with death. 

Maitimo had, somehow, felt its inception before she did. 

“Cánië, let me.”

He was her big brother and she was a king. Her smile grew and she settled on his back, musing on the twisted way by which fancies might find actualisation. Things could have been worse still, however, and she would not complain. She closed her eyes, hummed a song, and thought that that was how a gentle sea must feel when placidly undulating against the solid earth.

When she awoke, Maitimo had settled her next to a clean pool of water in a mellow sunset.

She looked around. The landscape had begun to change. There were plants. Brazen trees, which had outlived the earthquakes and the wrath of the Valar, were shedding their leaves, and fox-fires gleamed on dead wood.

“The forest thrives with death, too,” Maitimo said. “This winter will pass for us all.” 

It would be the longest they had faced yet.

Macalaurë took off Maitimo's armour, dented and corroded in several places, and the many layers of worn out clothing, all made by harsh loving hands, he wore beneath. They knew well (they had soon learnt it) that washing the blood from them was impossible. Their own bodies were much easier to cleanse, and the pure water in which they stood together vivified them.

“Come summer we will bear fruit, too.” 

Maitimo laid his hand over her belly, which was still flat. It was in fact much thinner than it should have been, but that too would change. 

Still naked, they sat on soft grass, and took out the Silmarilli for the first time since recovering them.

Maitimo closed his hand around one. He held his breath, and dread seeped into his raddled face. Macalaurë creased her brow. She took the second gem and laid her other hand over Maitimo's one. The scars on his body were to her eyes monuments to his fortitude, emblems of victory, and she would not let anything take that from him. 

She knelt up and pressed her lips against his, chastely, then brushed them down along the deep furrow in his jaw, which continued to his shoulder, and nestled her head there. 

“The Valar have no power over you,” she asserted, her strong voice caressing his marked skin. He belonged to her, and her own wishes would outweigh any other fate, and wrestle it to the ground together with despair.

Maitimo slowly relaxed and his arms locked around her, pulling her even closer. 

The light from the two gems settled to a gentle quivering heat in the palm of their hands.

The Sarn Athrad along with most of the old course of the river Gelion were underwater by midnight, but they were already walking again by then, hand in hand, not looking back at the land that crumbled behind them. 

“This place was never meant for us. Let the Valar cherish their own,” Macalaurë said, as the echo of one more earthquake rippled under their feet.

They walked, towards the east, where life would begin again.

**Author's Note:**

> I referred to [this map](http://i.stack.imgur.com/BtwPY.png) to determine which parts of Beleriand weren't underwater by the end of the First Age (though I took some liberties anyway).
> 
> As for the incantation, I happened to remember an archaic Roman charm for the healing of dislocations, translated it into Quenya and decided to stick it into the fic (Fëanor is supposed to have cursed Morgoth thrice, which can be taken to mean that he blessed his children, I guess). It roughly translates to: Be blessed/ May this torment cease/ I'll curse your sufferings.


End file.
